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Sunday, February 7, 2010

Virus and trojan horse attack through FamilySearch Forums

I got an E-mail message supposedly sent from FamilySearch Forums -- Beta, that claimed to be a private message. Fortunately, I am using my Macintosh and when I opened the message it opened a window that looked like a "Windows" virus checking software download. The window showed a so-called virus check that then said my computer was infected with all sorts of viruses and trojan horses. This was pretty interesting to me since my Apple does not have a C Drive to get infected. I do run Parallels Desktop, but at the time, Windows 7 was not operating and so there was no "computer" to check. When I tried to close the window, the program immediately loaded an unnamed program on my hard drive. I have all of my downloads go to my desktop and I could see the file download. The malware downloaded four more copies of the bad program before I could get it to stop. Heads up. This is a serious problem. Had I not been accessing the the message on a Macintosh, it would have likely infected my computer big time. The message came from a "razzorman" or "razzerman." Watch out for this.

By the way. When I went to my other Macintosh computer, I shut down Windows 7 before going to the Forums Website. When I got to the Website, I was immediately notified that I had a private message. When I tried to click off the notice, it tried to load the malware again but the download was blocked by Firefox.

A word to the wise, this bad E-mail came through all of the spam filters and also through the Cox Internet filters because it appeared to be from a legitimate source.